US Astronaut Stanley Love: Our new Green Interview

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An astronaut doesn’t see the Earth the same way you do. And if the astronaut started as a planetary scientist, striving to understand the solar system, he really sees the Earth differently. Furthermore, if he was the child of environmentally-sensitive parents who were well ahead of their time, he started out with an unusually sophisticated view of the Earth.

Stanley Love

I’m describing US Astronaut Stanley Love, who is our newest Green Interview. He’s spent nearly two weeks in space, and he has piloted a tiny submersible deep under the ocean. He has a PhD in astronomy from the University of Washington. He has studied the solar system in great detail, and he knows how precious the Earth is. He does a brilliant presentation in which he reviews the entire solar system in considerable detail.

Was there, could there be, life on Mars or Venus? Well, it seems that both of them once had liquid water, which suggests that life might have existed — but they’re now so hot that your blood would boil if you went there without a space suit.

He also examines the possibilities we would have if we totally wrecked our own planet, and had to find another. His conclusion, which he presents with relentless logic, is that it would be almost impossible to geo-engineer another planet to be habitable, even if we could afford the cost. In short, there’s nothing else available. The moral of his remarkable story is that we need to take loving care of the planet we’ve been given. There is, literally, no Planet B.

The interview with Stanley Love is — well, just out of this world. You can see a six-minute excerpt from the full-length interview here